


poor tactics and bad timing

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:35:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5501036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Why,” Ward asks slowly, casually, as if he isn’t holding her life in his hands, “should we trust you? It’s been months since the uprising and now you decide you’re ready to declare your allegiance to HYDRA?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	poor tactics and bad timing

**Author's Note:**

> SapphireGlyphs prompted "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good" as a first line. It didn't work out.

Jemma’s throat goes dry and her gaze settles quite firmly on the gun. She can’t seem to tear her eyes away from it.

“Why,” Ward asks slowly, casually, as if he isn’t holding her life in his hands, “should we trust you? It’s been months since the uprising and _now_ you decide you’re ready to declare your allegiance to HYDRA?”

She has an answer for this. May ran her through it a dozen times just last night. _Why_ can’t she remember?

“There are rumors that SHIELD’s finally getting its shit together,” he says, stalking ever closer. “Why shouldn’t I suspect you of being one of them?”

“I- um,” she swallows to moisten her vocal chords. “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good?”

He rolls his eyes and lowers the pistol. “Really? That’s the best you can do?”

“I know what I’m _supposed_ to say.” And she _does_ \- but only now that he’s no longer threatening her.

“So what happened?”

“I don’t know!” She leans against the table he uses for cleaning weapons while he coaches her. “I got nervous.”

He sets the gun down beside her and rests his hand just past it on the cold tabletop. “Okay, that’s okay.”

She scoffs.

“It is. They’re gonna want to make you nervous. If you’re not at all, it’ll look weird.”

“Would _you_ be nervous?” she asks.

“ _Yes_.”

Somehow she has trouble believing that. Not only is Ward the most likely of any of them - with the exception of May - to successfully escape an enemy stronghold, this is what he _does_. He’s trained in deception.

“It should be me doing this,” he sighs, as if reading her thoughts. His arms cross and he leans one hip against the table, no longer looking at her.

It _should_ be. He has the training and the experience and the know-how to get himself out of all the dangerous situations he’s busy drilling her on. But it also  _can’t_ be him. They don’t know what HYDRA knows about Centipede’s downfall. If Ward tries to go in and they know he betrayed Garrett - betrayed HYDRA itself - for their team, he’ll be dead before they can extract him and before getting out a single bit of usable intel.

“We need someone who can report on HYDRA’s scientific advances,” she reminds him softly.

His eyebrows rise in reluctant acknowledgement of that fact. “Still. There are other people who could go. Fitz-”

“Doesn’t have the temperament,” she cuts in quickly. She can only imagine the trouble Fitz’s temper would get him into inside HYDRA.

Ward chuckles darkly. “Point. But you’re a horrible liar - and without you, Fitz and his temper tantrums are in charge of the labs. When they find out you’re not coming back, Coulson’s probably gonna have to increase pay to keep most of the guys around.”

Jemma looks away and smiles to herself. “He’s not _that_ bad.”

“He’s not that bad to _you_. Everyone else, he’s a jerk to.” Ward pushes off from the table and grabs the gun from behind him before pacing a few feet away. It gives Jemma the time she needs to school her features.

He has, unwittingly, hit on the primary reason for her departure. She’s not wrong that they desperately need the intelligence only someone with her skills will have access to, but what she asked Coulson for was any assignment that would take her from the Playground. She loves her team - _all_ of them - but Fitz is not content to be one of the many.

He took it well enough when she could only answer his confession with a request for time. Likely he expected as much, coming as it was in the days after SHIELD’s fall. She needed to let herself calm down and figure out what she felt.

But when she finally got up the nerve to tell him that she didn’t return his affections, he was hurt - and confused, as well. After so many years together, after being so constantly compared to one another as if they are the same person split in two bodies, he didn’t understand how they could be so different in this.

As Ward said, Fitz is still perfectly civil to her and she only knows the difference in him because she was there to see the cause for it, but there _is_ a difference. It’s difficult for him to be around her now without coming away from it hurting. He does everything in his power to keep up his work - his _very important_ work - while also avoiding her.

If they were normal people with normal lives, she imagines he’d have neatly extracted himself from hers to save himself the pain of seeing her every day, but he can’t, not without abandoning SHIELD, and he’s too much of a good man to do that. So she’s doing it for him.

Ward turns once he’s a few feet away and raises the gun again. His expression goes cold and distant, and for a moment she’s reminded of that horrible day in Cuba. “Why are you here, Dr. Simmons?”

“Um, I-” She tries to remember May’s training and Ward gives an almost imperceptible nod of his head, reminding her even while keeping up his act that fear is fine, she just needs to breathe and think through it. “I was frightened,” she says. “The uprising was ... unpleasant, and there were stories about SHIELD agents being murdered without even being given the chance to transfer their loyalties. I wasn’t certain how I would be _received_.” She puts a little emphasis on the words and focuses her attention on the gun.

Ward smiles. “Good. Now, what if someone finds you where you’re not supposed to be? What do you say then?”

“I’m not supposed to go anywhere out of my clearance,” she reminds him. “I’m meant to be a good little HYDRA soldier and do as I’m told and climb the ranks without making waves that are likely to get my head chopped off.”

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” He twists the gun to draw her attention back to it. “Now what do you say to get out of it?”

She has no plans to go skulking about a HYDRA base and can’t think of any reason why she would. It would almost certainly undermine her mission, exposing her as a mole and, at best, putting her in danger of being killed or, at worst, tortured and brainwashed. As she’d rather not have either of those things happen, it’s a truly absurd demand and she treats it as such.

“I suppose,” she says, thinking of what Skye might do in her place, “I would kiss the fellow who found me - to avoid the mess that simple flirting led to the last time I tried it.” She wrinkles her nose at the memory of shooting poor Agent Sitwell - but as he ended up being HYDRA, she doesn’t feel entirely badly about it.

“No,” Ward says.

“What? Why not?”

He runs a hand over his scalp and winces at how short his hair is these days. She had to cut it quite close to stitch up a laceration just behind his ear - he’s lucky that was the worst of it after that fall - and he’s still not used to it like this.

“You start randomly kissing men and they’ll know something’s up.”

“Which won’t matter if I kiss them well enough. I’ll be out of the facility and signaling extraction before they even remember why they stopped me in the first place.”

“Seriously?” he asks.

“I’m perfectly capable of kissing someone to distraction; I’m quite talented - and I could even provide you with references if all my exes weren’t dead or MIA.”

His mouth thins into a hard line. “I’m being serious, Simmons.”

As if she isn’t - about her reputation, at any rate, not his absurd scenario.

“You have to think of every eventuality - plan _now_ , while you’re safe and secure and not under all the pressure of being surrounded on every side by the enemy.”

Jemma is very proud of her reputation as an exceptional kisser. It was a way of combating the bookworm stereotype so many people liked to pin on her at a young age, as though a high intellect necessitated prudishness. And she could _die_ on this mission - as Ward is _so_ fond of reminding her - and she does _not_ intend on being remembered as average. Besides, as her plan is a sound one, it’s certain to work on Ward.

She dodges easily past the gun he’s practically forgotten he’s holding and grips the front of his shirt to drag him down for a kiss. He’s shocked for a brief moment - entirely to be expected - and before he can think to pull away she nips at his lower lip to get his mouth open. He melts against her, a low rumble moving from his chest to hers as they fill in the spaces between them.

He’s still holding the gun and that arm is an iron bar at her back while his other hand dips into her hair, just as rough and pleasant as his lips on hers.

It never occurred to her before that Ward would be an accomplished kisser as well. She’s never held it against anyone on its own, but she doesn’t often find a man who rises to her personal standards in that regard - and men like ward, especially attractive men, are even less likely to. They seem to feel there’s no need, that their looks are enough to get by on.

Somewhere in the back of her mind is the thought that there might have been a whole course at the Operations Academy on kissing. That, by dating SciTech and Communications graduates almost exclusively, she’s been missing out. But that thought is a passing one because she realizes _she_ is in danger of losing focus.

She wraps her hand around the back of Ward’s neck and presses up against him, bringing herself more vertical (and, it really must be noted, pressing her breasts against his chest in a _very_ pleasant way).

She pulls away, working hard at controlling her breathing. It’s on the tip of her tongue to ask, in as cheeky a tone as she’s able, if he believes her now, but he beats her.

“You remember how I said you shouldn’t kiss strange HYDRA agents?” he asks, his voice rough.

Absently, she notes that his arms are still around her even though he clearly retains his cognitive faculties. In fact, his hand is kneading pleasant circles at the spot on her spine that always aches after she’s spent too long pouring over a tablet.

“This is why.” He leans in slightly, as if to resume their kiss, but stops at the last moment with barely any space at all between them.

Wait.  _What?_

“You-?” she asks, fingering the low collar of his shirt. She has no idea how to complete the question.

He makes that sound again - and it strikes her this time that it’s a sad one - and steps purposefully back from her. She feels cold without him against her and wraps her arms loosely around herself.

“I don’t like the idea of you kissing- well, kissing anyone. But you still shouldn’t try that. Best case scenario: it works too well and you wind up with a HYDRA stalker.”

He moves past her to busy himself at the table.

Ward likes her - which, of _course_ he does. He likes them all - enough to turn his back on HYDRA for them, to stand by them in their uncertainty rather than take his place in the uprising. But Ward might actually _like_ her.

Jemma wishes that Skye were allowed to know anything about this mission. She wants terribly to run to her quarters and tell her all about the conversation and the kiss and to get her advice on what to do now. Because Jemma has no idea.

When Fitz confessed he had feelings for her, she knew she needed time to consider her own. Everything had been altered by the uprising and she had to carefully examine herself before making any serious sort of decision. But now there’s no time to consider anything. She’s going undercover and may very well never return to the Playground again. She _can’t_ return Ward’s feelings - though there was a time, not long before the uprising, when she was still rather hopelessly infatuated with him and that small, teenage girl part of her that thrilled every time he smiled in her direction is pouting horribly that there’s nothing to be done about this.

She doesn’t know if those feelings are still really there after his betrayal or if they’re enough to build on, all she knows is that it would be unfair to them both to pursue this.

“What would you say,” she asks, turning to face him, “if _you_ were found somewhere you shouldn’t be?”

Some of the tension leeches out of his hunched shoulders and when he turns, there’s a small, relieved smile on his face.

The lesson resumes and though Ward is much better at hiding his true feelings than Fitz, Jemma knows that once again everything has changed. Only, this time, it doesn’t leave her wanting to run for enemy territory. It makes her want more than anything to stay.

 


End file.
